‘What is a Longhi Ball?’
‘You know, Venetian. Real water, with real gondolas floating on it, in the ballroom. “O sole mio” on a hundred guitars, all the footmen in masks and capes, no light except from candles in Venetian lanterns until the guests get to the ballroom, when a searchlight will be trained on Cedric and your mother, receiving from a gondola. Fairly different from your ball, Polly? Oh, yes, and I know, Cedric won’t allow any Royalties to be asked at all, because he says they ruin everything, in London; he says they are quite different in Paris where they know their place.’
‘Goodness!’ said Polly, ‘how times have changed. Not even old Super-Ma’am?’
‘No, not even your mother’s new Infanta. Cedric was adamant.’
‘Fanny, it’s your duty to go to it – you will, won’t you?’
‘Oh, darling, I can’t. I feel so sleepy after dinner when I am pregnant, you know, I really couldn’t drag myself. We shall hear about it all right, from Cedric.’
‘And when does it take place?’
‘Under a month from now, the sixteenth, I believe.’
‘Why, that’s the very day I’m expecting my baby, how convenient. Then when everything’s all over we can meet, can’t we? You will fix it, promise.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, we shan’t be able to hold Cedric back. He’s fearfully interested in you, you’re Rebecca to him.’
Boy came back to my house just as we were finishing our tea, he looked perished with cold and very tired but Polly would not let him wait while some fresh tea was made. She allowed him to swallow a tepid cup and dragged him off.
‘I suppose you’ve lost the key of the car, as usual,’ she said unkindly on their way downstairs.
‘No no, here it is, on my key-ring.’
‘Miracle,’ said Polly, ‘well then, good-bye, my darling, I’ll telephone and we’ll do some more benders.’
When Alfred came in later on I said to him,
‘I’ve seen Polly, just imagine, she spent the whole day here, and oh, Alfred! she’s not a bit in love any more!’
‘Do you never think of anything but who is or is not in love with whom?’ he said, in tones of great exasperation.
Norma, I knew, would be just as uninterested, and I longed very much for Davey or Cedric to pick it all over with.
8
So Polly now settled into her aunt’s house at Silkin. It had always been Lady Patricia’s house more than Boy’s, as she was the one who lived there all the time, while Boy flitted about between Hampton and London with occasional visits to the Continent, and it was arranged inside with a very feminine form of tastelessness, that is to say, no taste and no comfort either. It was a bit better than Norma’s house, but not much, the house itself being genuinely old instead of Banbury Road old and standing in the real country instead of an Oxford suburb; it contained one or two good pieces of furniture, and where Norma would have had cretonnes the Dougdales had Boy’s needlework. But there were many similarities, especially upstairs, where linoleum covered the floors, and every bathroom, in spite of the childlessness of the Dougdales, was a nursery bathroom, smelling strongly of not very nice soap.
Polly did not attempt to alter anything. She just flopped into Lady Patricia’s bed, in Lady Patricia’s bedroom whose windows looked out on to Lady Patricia’s grave. ‘Beloved wife of Harvey Dougdale’ said the gravestone, which had been erected some weeks after poor Harvey Dougdale had acquired a new beloved wife. ‘She shall not grow old as we that are left grow old.’
I think Polly cared very little about houses, which, for her, consisted of Hampton and the rest, and that if she could no longer live at Hampton she could not take much interest in any other house anywhere else. Whatever it was in life that Polly did care for, and time had yet to disclose the mystery, it was certainly not her home. She was in no sense what the French call a femme d’intérieur and her household arrangements were casual to the verge of chaos. Nor any longer, alas, was it Boy. Complete disillusion had set in as far as he was concerned, and she was behaving towards him with exactly the same offhand coldness that had formerly characterized her attitude towards her mother, the only difference being that whereas she had always been a little frightened of Lady Montdore it was Boy, in this case, who was a little frightened of her.
Boy was busily occupied with his new book. It was to be called Three Dukes, and the gentlemen it portrayed were considered by Boy to be perfect prototypes of nineteenth-century aristocracy in their three countries. The Dukes in question were Paddington, Souppes and Pincio, all masters, it seemed, of the arts of anecdote, adultery, and gourmandise, members of the Paris Jockey Club, gamblers and sportsmen. He had a photograph, the frontispiece for his book, of all three together taken at a shoot at Landçut. They stood in front of an acre of dead animals and, with their tummies, their beards, their deerstalker’s hats and white gaiters, they looked like nothing so much as three King Edwards all in a row. Polly told me that he had finished Pincio while they were in Sicily, the present man having put the necessary documents at his disposal, and was now engaged upon Paddington with the assistance of the duke’s librarian, motoring off to Paddington Park every morning, notebook in hand. The idea was that when that was finished he should go to France in pursuit of Souppes. Nobody ever had the least objection to Boy ‘doing’ their ancestors. He always made them charming and endowed them with delightful vices, besides which it gave a guarantee, a hall-mark of ancient lineage, since he never would take on anybody whose family did not
